Morning Scan

The AI infrastructure money keeps compounding: data centers, debt, enterprise deployments, and now the Pentagon — all accelerating at the same time. A few of the week's shinier narratives (Colossus, Agentforce, Anthropic's run rate) are getting a closer look in the cold light of Friday.

$14.5B — Taiwanese tech firms have already completed a record amount of debt deals this year, racing to finance AI capacity build-out. (Bloomberg)

Machines & Minds

Taiwanese Tech Firms Complete Record $14.5B in Debt Deals YTD

The AI capacity race is now a debt supercycle, and Taiwan's chipmakers are borrowing at a pace that would have been unthinkable two years ago. (Bloomberg)

AtlasEdge Raises $1.2B in Debt to Scale European Data Centers

European data-center infrastructure is finally catching up to demand — Liberty Global and DigitalBridge's joint venture just made one of the continent's bigger infrastructure bets. (The Next Web)

Australia's Record $6.2B Data Center Quarter Lifted National Investment Growth

Up roughly 2x quarter-over-quarter — data centers are now a macroeconomic line item for an entire country. (Bloomberg)

Pentagon Signs $9.7B Five-Year Deal with Dell for Microsoft 365 and Cloud

The US military is standardizing on commercial cloud at scale, and Dell is the unexpected vehicle for a nearly $10B software contract. (CNBC)

Connected World

Salesforce Q1: Revenue Up 13%, Agentforce ARR Up 205% to $1.2B

Agentforce is growing fast, but the below-consensus Q2 forecast is the number the market will actually argue about today. (CNBC)

Salesforce Goes "Headless" as Anthropic's Usage of Sales Cloud Increases 5x

When your fastest-growing enterprise customer accesses your product entirely through an LLM, the traditional UI stops being the product. (The Register)

Meta Eyes Cloud Computing Business If Data Center Spending Produces Excess Capacity

Zuckerberg is floating a fourth major cloud competitor as casually as you'd float a meeting agenda item. (CNBC)

Meta Plans to Embed Engineers Inside Large Enterprise Customers for AI Deployment

This is the old-school enterprise sales playbook — white-glove deployment teams — revived for the AI adoption era. (The Information)

“One big reason why Anthropic is having a blowout quarter is that companies have been 'tokenmaxxing' for the last few months, encouraging employees to use GenAI as much as possible, without much regard to payoff.” — Gary Marcus

Connected World

Google Engineer Charged with Insider Trading After Making $1.2M on Polymarket

Prediction markets meeting insider trading law was always going to produce a test case eventually — this appears to be it. (TechCrunch)

Kirkland & Ellis Sets Aside $500M to Build Its Own Proprietary AI Platform

The world's highest-grossing law firm is betting that its competitive edge lives in AI it controls, not AI it shares with opposing counsel. (Financial Times)

Philly Semiconductor Index Up ~75% YTD, On Track for Best Year Since 1999

For context, 1999 was also a year people were asking whether valuations had completely decoupled from fundamentals. (Financial Times)

Ferrari Unveils Its First Electric Vehicle — and the Car World Is Upset About It

The Luce exists, it's electric, and the purists are apparently in mourning — which means it's probably fine. (WIRED)